Chapter 1
Cooper
The Present…
“I really need a favor, Coop,” my friend, Chase Durand, told me when I answered my cell phone.
No greeting?
No smart-ass comments?
This definitely was not behavior that was typical of Chase.
He continued in a sober tone, “I wouldn’t ask, but Wyatt and I are still in Paris. We’ll probably have to be here for a few more months. We’re trying to move as much of the headquarters as possible back to San Diego so we won’t have to be here as long in the future. Neither of us like being away from Last Hope for months at a time. But this extended stay really sucks right now.”
The hair stood up at the back of my neck.
Something was wrong.
Chase was rarely this serious. His older brother, Wyatt, tended to be much quieter and more thoughtful, but if Chase wasn’t joking around, something definitely wasn’t right.
“What’s up?” I asked.
I’d always trusted Chase to have my back in any situation, and that wasn’t something I could say about very many people in my life—other than my own brothers.
If he needed my help because he was out of the country, I was all over whatever that problem might be. He’d do the same for me in a heartbeat.
“Are you home?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I confirmed as I headed toward my kitchen. “Just walked through the door, actually. I got out of the office a little early today.”
It was Friday, and since I’d been working late all week at the office because Montgomery Mining was opening a new diamond mine, I’d decided to knock off a little early this afternoon. All of the issues with the new mine had been resolved.
I’d planned on changing my clothes and heading toward the dog training center my brother Jax and I supported financially. The dogs that were selected from the shelter were taught to function as assistance dogs for military veterans.
There were currently a couple of intelligent canines there that I took out for a run regularly because they needed to blow off steam.
However, whatever Chase needed right now was going to take priority. My run with the mutts would have to wait.
“It’s Torie,” Chase explained.
I tensed and held back a tormented groan.
Thirteen days.
Six hours.
Ten Minutes.
And…
I took a glance at my watch.
Exactly twenty-seven seconds.
That was precisely how long it had been since I’d first met Victoria “Torie” Durand, Chase and Wyatt’s younger sister.
Fuck! Anything but that! I’d just as soon parachute out of a plane at high altitude and into shark-infested waters than to deal with any kind of issue for Chase that involved his little sister, Torie Durand.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like Torie…exactly. Truth was, since the moment we’d met almost two weeks ago, I’d tried really hard to avoid her.
She was wickedly smart, a talented linguist who spoke and wrote more languages than any single person should be capable of translating.
She was also strikingly beautiful.
And, for some damn reason, I’d felt some kind of weird connection to her since the moment we’d met, which I logically knew was impossible.
I was pragmatic.
I was not in the least idealistic.
I didn’t believe in soul mates or having an affinity with another person I’d just met.
It wasn’t…rational.
There was no such thing as an instant connection with another person, for fuck’s sake.
The thought was pure fantasy.
So, yeah, I could ignore that weird sense of affinity I’d mistakenly thought I’d felt that couldn’t possibly exist.
What I couldn’t overlook was the very real fact that my dick got rock-hard every time we were in the same space together.
I couldn’t see her—or even think about her—without wanting to get her naked.
Quite honestly, I wasn’t sure how to handle a physical attraction that fierce since it had never happened quite that way for me before.
So yeah, Victoria Durand was trouble. I’d learned to steer clear of anything or anyone that might interfere with my vow to stay romantically unentangled.
That shit had never worked out well for me.
Over the last year, I hadn’t even been tempted to change my mind about dating…until Torie Durand.
Damned if she didn’t make me want to reconsider my stance on relationships—which made her extremely dangerous to me.
That’s why I avoided her.
I was better off alone.
I didn’t need a romantic relationship in my life…again. Not after the last one had worked out particularly bad.
Before I could draw a breath to tell Chase I’d send one of my brothers to help him out, he continued. “I called Torie earlier. She went for a hike this afternoon at Mission Trails Park. She supposedly tweaked her ankle, whatever the hell that means. She claims that she’s fine, and she’s walking out of the park, but she joked that her progress was going to be slow. It’s likely to be dark before she makes it back to the parking lot. I don’t like it, Coop. She’s a really experienced hiker, and I get that it’s an urban park where you’re never that far from the city, but she’s still an injured female in eight thousand acres of undeveloped land. She’s alone, Coop. I hate the thought of her being that vulnerable.”
Fuck! There was an edgy desperation in Chase’s tone that I’d never heard before. Unfortunately, his uneasiness immediately sparked the same discomfort inside of me.
My jaw twitched as I yanked a backpack out of a closet near the front door. I took it with me back to the kitchen and started to toss some supplies into it.
There was no way in hell I wasn’t going after Torie myself at this point. There was no time for someone else to do it. I wasn’t waiting until I could get in touch with one of my older brothers.
Yeah, there were probably others on the trails today. It was a popular park in the cooler, winter weather because it had very little shade in the summer. But those visitors weren’t going to help Torie since she didn’t know any of them. In fact, it was those other people at the park who concerned me.
She was alone.
She was hurt, which made her prey to anyone with nefarious intentions.
And knowing she had no one around to watch out for her when she was almost defenseless bothered me more than the fact that my dick got hard every time I saw her.
I took a quick glance at my watch.
It was after three o’clock. Since we were just barely into January, the sun would set by five.
Some of those trails could be a little rocky and uneven for someone with an ankle injury.
Hell, Chase was right. There was no way she wasn’t going to lose the light before she could get out of the park. Did she even have a headlamp or a flashlight with her?
“What supplies does she have? How far is she from the parking lot?” I asked tersely as I sprinted up the stairs to get a sweatshirt.
“Next to nothing,” Chase answered, his voice irritated. “This wasn’t supposed to be an overnighter or an evening hike. It was more like a…longish midafternoon walk for Torie. She said she’d planned on being home before it was even close to dark. It looks to me like she was about three miles from her vehicle when I talked to her, which wouldn’t be a big deal if she wasn’t injured. She sounded like she was hurting, Coop. She says everything is fine, but I’d feel a hell of a lot better if I was there to walk out with her. She might need someone to look at that ankle.”
“I’m on it,” I assured him. “Do you think we should alert the rangers?”
“Already done,” Chase informed me. “They weren’t particularly concerned since she’s not exactly missing, and she’s not requesting medical assistance. Her intention is to leave the park on her own two feet. Hell, maybe I’m overreacting because—”
“You’re not,” I grumbled. “If this was happening to Riley, I’d be worried, too.” I’d go after my younger sister in a heartbeat if she were in the same situation, so I could relate to Chase’s frustration. “I’ll be out of here and on my way in a few minutes. It will probably take me twenty minutes to get there. Do you have coordinates of where she’s at right now?”
My waterfront home in La Jolla wasn’t that far from where Torie was located, but it was after three on a Friday. Traffic was going to suck.
“She’s on the move,” Chase replied. “But I’ll send you the map of the trail she’s on and what her coordinates were when I talked to her on the phone. I have a feeling she hasn’t gotten very far.”
“That works,” I told him as I raced back down the stairs to the kitchen again. “I know that park pretty well.” I’d gone running there plenty of times, so none of the trails were unfamiliar to me. I just needed Torie’s general location to find her since there were several trails she could be following.
“She’s trying to pretend like she’s all right,” Chase grumbled. “But she’s not. I think she’s just trying not to worry me, but it’s not fucking working. I can hear the pain in her voice—no matter how well she tries to hide it. She might be moving, but I can tell that every step is killing her.”
My heart sank.
Shit!
I really didn’t like thinking about Torie in any kind of pain, either.
“Why is she out there alone? Doesn’t she have hiking buddies?” I questioned Chase.
“Torie likes to do solo trips sometimes to clear her head, but it’s actually been quite a while since she’s been out on any trail,” he explained.
“I’ll find her,” I promised Chase. “And I’ll get her injury checked out.”
“Thanks, man,” Chase replied, sounding relieved. “Torie won’t be happy that I sent someone to check on her after she told me she was okay.”
I finally hefted the pack over my shoulder and reached for the keys to my Range Rover. “I’ll do my best not to make it obvious that you sent me,” I told him.
“She’ll know,” Chase said unhappily. “Her intuition is scary. I doubt she’ll believe it’s a coincidence that you just happened to show up in that park.”
“You’re probably right,” I agreed. “She seems too damn smart to buy that, but I’ll do my best.”
“So you two have obviously met now that she’s volunteering at Last Hope,” Chase surmised.
I dropped my pack into the passenger seat and got into my vehicle. “We have,” I answered, hoping he wouldn’t ask more questions.
Chase and Wyatt had arrived in Europe a month or so before Torie had decided to join Last Hope, a volunteer private rescue organization that we all belonged to now.
Until very recently, Last Hope had consisted solely of guys who were previous special forces members. We took on foreign rescue operations that the government wouldn’t touch.
Torie and my brother Jax’s girlfriend, Harlow, had been the first two women to join the secret organization because we’d needed the services they were offering.
Harlow was a weather specialist.
Torie was a linguist.
My first meeting with Torie had happened at Last Hope headquarters in downtown San Diego nearly two weeks ago.
I’d done my best to avoid her at headquarters ever since.
It wasn’t like we hung out together, but yeah, we’d…met.
“I always assumed you two would get along,” Chase mused.
“Why?” I questioned dryly as I got on the freeway. “Just because our IQs are both so high that it makes us freaks of nature.”
Torie was intellectually gifted, just like I was, but her talents obviously leaned more toward the languages, while mine were more generalized in reasoning abilities and logic.
“It’s not just that,” Chase replied, ignoring my sarcasm. “You two actually have a lot in common. Torie likes the outdoors. You’re both hikers, and she shares your love of reading and history. Although I have to admit that you’re both so stubborn that you might just end up clashing.”
“I’m not stubborn,” I grumbled.
Chase chuckled. “Says the man who hasn’t gotten laid in over a year because his girlfriend was stupid enough to dump him so she could marry an idiot.”
I wasn’t even going to argue about his assumption since it was true. For the most part, anyway. “Fuck off, Durand. You know nothing about my sex life.”
And even if he did know that I was having a long dry spell, I doubted very much that he’d want Torie to be the woman who fixed that particular problem.
No doubt Chase had hoped that Torie and I would become friends, not lovers.
“I’ll let you get away with telling me to fuck off since you’re helping me out,” Chase answered with a chuckle. “How are things going at Last Hope? We’ve been an all-male organization for so long that it has to be strange to have women at the headquarters.”
“Having Harlow and Torie on board helps a lot,” I admitted reluctantly. “It’s great as long as the two of them stay safe,” I replied. “It’s not the fact that they’re female that concerns me. It’s their lack of experience in rescue situations. Both Harlow and Torie have incredibly valuable skills, but I don’t want to see either one of them in a situation they aren’t trained to handle.”
“They won’t be,” Chase assured me. “We’ll all be watching out for both of them, and they’re perfectly safe at headquarters. The place is harder to get into than Fort Knox. Neither one of them will ever be present on missions. Fuck knows that Jax isn’t about to see Harlow do anything that might harm a hair on her head.”
“No, he definitely won’t,” I agreed. My brother practically lost his shit if his girlfriend got a hangnail. Not that I didn’t understand that—to a point—since Harlow had been a captive and put through hell and back during that kidnapping. Jax would give up his own life before he’d see Harlow in any kind of danger.
The same with my brother Hudson when it came to his fiancée, Taylor, the second victim in the same kidnapping as Harlow’s.
I shook my head as I got onto the freeway.
My two older brothers were completely screwed when it came to the women in their lives.
Honestly, I never thought I’d ever see Hudson or Jax fall so hard, but the two of them were thoroughly lost. Furthermore, they didn’t seem to give a damn if they never found their way back to sanity again.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like Taylor and Harlow. Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for two better women for my older brothers.
I just wished Jax and Hudson weren’t so damn…obsessive and irrational when it came to Taylor and Harlow.
Love had made both of them lose their minds, but they were such happy lunatics that it was hard not to be glad for both of them. Hell, if spending the rest of their lives half insane was what they really wanted, I wasn’t going to keep reminding them that they were completely illogical when it came to the women in their lives.
“Since we rarely get out in the field anymore, we’ll all take turns making sure they’re safe while they’re helping out at headquarters,” Chase told me earnestly.
“Do you ever miss it?” I asked Chase before I could stop myself.
“What?”
“Doing the missions ourselves?”
Since Hudson, Jax, and I had pretty recognizable faces, we’d stopped running the actual rescue missions ourselves a few years ago.
Even though we avoided the press as much as possible, three billionaire brothers had a very hard time dodging the media all the time.
Wyatt and Chase had quit going into the field for the same reasons.
We’d known that if anyone recognized our faces, even our victims, that Last Hope would lose that edge of secrecy that had helped us be so successful with so many missions over the years.
It wasn’t like our skills at strategically planning the missions weren’t important, but sometimes it sucked to hand over a planned op to someone else to carry out. It definitely wasn’t something any of us had done when we’d been active duty in special forces.
Sometimes, handing those missions over to someone else to execute still felt unnatural, even though we knew it was necessary, and we’d been doing it for years now.
“I do miss it,” Chase confessed in a low, thoughtful voice. “But I have to have faith in the men we’ve taken on as volunteers. I don’t want my identity to jeopardize any current or future rescue operations.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Last Hope is the last organization of its kind, so I’m willing to do almost anything to make sure we’re not outed.”
“I’m not gonna lie,” Chase confessed. “There have been plenty of times I’ve wished I could tag along instead of executing everything from headquarters.”
“Me, too,” I admitted.
Chase chuckled. “We need that brain of yours at headquarters, Coop. You’re a lot more valuable in mission problem solving at headquarters than you are in the field.” He hesitated for a moment before he added gruffly, “Thanks for doing this for me.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I said, meaning every word.
What Chase was asking me to do was a small favor.
The only thing making it difficult was how badly I wanted to get Torie Durand naked.
I kept my mouth shut. My difficulty keeping my dick under control when I saw Torie wasn’t an issue I ever planned on sharing with her older brother.
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